Hike Activity Highly Inaccurate.

I'd suggest looking at your Autopause settings.

I use the watch heavily while hiking and I've not had trouble with that.  Check your settings, as the other poster noted..... 

I've tried with and without auto-pause. I've tried with data recording every 1 second and auto. Nothing works. Have you guys actually compared with distance and moving and stopped times with a garmin handheld such as an oregon or GPSMAP device?  I can tell you that I've studied this a lot and the Fenix 5 is considerably off !!

I've tried with and without auto-pause. I've tried with data recording every 1 second and auto. Nothing works. Have you guys actually compared with distance and moving and stopped times with a garmin handheld such as an oregon or GPSMAP device?  I can tell you that I've studied this a lot and the Fenix 5 is considerably off !!

As I said, these fields are inaccurate regardless of auto-stop settings. In any case auto-stop is not suppose to affect these fields. Auto-stop setting merely control whether or not data should continue to be recorded while you are not moving. But that's it. I should only affect recording of data, not the computations of distance, time and speed.

If you take any Garmin handheld device, it computes these fields very well even though it is not in auto-stop.

I've noticed that too:  my fenix 5 registers about 15% more distance hiked than the actual distance as reported by topo maps, mileage signs along the route, and my spouse's forerunner gps reporting.  so this is a bummer for an expensive watch.

maybe you have the same situation then i had. i thought it was wrong, but i found out, that the distance which was counted more, was because of activated 3D-distance. so for example did a 13km hike with elevation distance of around 1500m and much ups and down in it. so i think it was not much off. 

Auto pause and 3D-distance settings are not the issue. I've owned enough Garmin devices to know that regardless of these settings, the Fenix 5X (and possibly other watch models) do not accurately keep track of when I am moving and I am not. As a result, distance, stopped time, moving time, moving speed, overall speed, and ETA are significantly inaccurate. I currently own an Oregon 600 and a GPSMAP 66i. They are both spot-on when it comes to detecting movement and differ significantly from the Fenix 5X. 

I've always had 3D distance off. I have tried with auto-stop setting both on and off. I get different results with auto-stop on or off, but they are both wrong.

With auto-stop set to on, it fails to quickly detect transitions between moving and not moving. Therefore my track log will have long straight-line segments for those periods where it failed to detect movement. This does not happen when I am mountain biking, thus it seems that it is not sensitive enough to hiking speeds. I don't have this issue with my Garmin hiking handhelds.

With auto-stop off, the distance is considerably longer because when I am not walking it keeps counting the small changes in position that happen due to GPS inaccuracy. The stopped time is also significantly smaller than what it should be. Again, this does not happen with handheld devices.

So if people think that this is not an issue is because they haven't been putting close attention to all these fields. And why is this important? Because with these inaccuracies the device will always report highly inaccurate estimated arrival times.

For those who think the auto-stop setting enables the watch to detect when you stop or move, you are wrong. The idea of this setting has always been to dictate whether you are always recording to the log on only recording when you are moving. The device data fields are supposed to be accurate regardless of this setting.

Hi,

Have you found out any way to fix this problem? Yesterday in a 12km +1500 hiking my Garmin Fénix 5 said 16Km. I use it normally  for hiking, so, I would like to know the real distance.